


The Color of Sapphires

by timelymeanwhile



Category: Captive Prince - C. S. Pacat
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Child Abuse, Gen, Implied/Referenced Incest, Implied/Referenced Rape
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-01
Updated: 2019-08-01
Packaged: 2020-07-10 06:03:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19900999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/timelymeanwhile/pseuds/timelymeanwhile
Summary: Nicaise closes his eyes, and sees a long line of beautiful boys with eyes the color of sapphires—made in the image of a golden prince whose memory outshines them all.Nicaise's final conversation with the Regent.





	The Color of Sapphires

**Author's Note:**

> Recently read this series for the first time and couldn't stop thinking about Nicaise and Laurent, the Regent's blue-eyed boys. Canon-typical warnings, obviously, apply.

The Regent is angry, and it's Laurent's fault.

It always is, when he's like this—simmering with tightly-controlled, barely-contained rage that cannot be expressed in public but is unleashed, eventually, behind closed doors.

When he cannot hurt his nephew, he hurts Nicaise instead. 

"Get out," he tells the men from Ravenel, two sharp words flung out like knives, and then the Regent and his pet are left alone.

The Regent paces the length of his quarters. Nicaise stays standing by the door, where he was called in just before the men from Ravenel arrived, and does not move.

When the Regent eventually speaks, his voice is calmer, cooler, almost— _almost_ —covering the wrath beneath. "Why," he asks at last, "would my nephew think he can defy me in this manner without consequences?" Nicaise keeps his eyes on the ground, and says nothing. Rhetorical questions, from the Regent, are safest unanswered. "One would almost think," the Regent continues, "he feels he holds some secret weapon over me." A perilous pause. "Wouldn't you say so, sweet boy?"

Heart hammering, Nicaise looks up.

The Regent is looking directly at him, with a shrewd, calculating expression that Nicaise has only ever seen directed at Laurent. It makes the blood in his veins go cold.

"You've been so good to him, so generous," he says after a steadying moment, drenching his voice in sweetness so cloying he can almost taste the sugar on his tongue. "He's nothing without you. He'll realize that. He'll remember how patient you are, how forgiving. He'll be sorry. If you could just—send him a message—”

“Send Laurent a message,” repeats the Regent.

“A letter,” Nicaise says, and stops. Forgets, for a moment, how to breathe.

The Regent's lips tug upward in a mirthless, mocking smile, and Nicaise understands why he was summoned to the Regent's rooms.

A letter to the Regent from Govart had arrived this morning. The Regent had dismissed Nicaise after reading it, and had not called him back until mere minutes ago. It's on his desk, still; Nicaise can see it: the parchment wrinkled as though crushed, then flattened again once more. 

The Regent follows his gaze, and Nicaise feels all the air sweep out of his lungs.

Govart can't have noticed what was missing, can't have known who took it. A single letter. A single piece of parchment wedged between the worn and faded pages of a payment ledger.

The Regent knows Nicaise likes to snoop; the Regent _wants_ Nicaise to snoop, to seek out secrets and bring them back to him, like a cat presenting its master with a dead mouse. The Regent knows Nicaise is good with secrets.

The Regent _knows_.

Does Laurent know, by now, too?

Laurent trusts Paschal, has always trusted Paschal—Paschal, he told Nicaise once, had cared for him when he was a boy. When Laurent found Nicaise crying after the Regent first fucked him—before Nicaise had found his strength and spite and newly-sharpened edges; before he knew the breathtaking boy in blue as anything but _The Prince,_ cold and distant and inscrutable—he took him straight to Paschal, and directed the physician to prepare a specific salve, and sat there the entire time until it was ready, telling Nicaise a story so funny and filthy that it made him stop crying to _laugh._

He had gone back to Paschal again and again that first year, until he was old enough and strong enough to no longer need salves or sympathy. 

Then, he had gone back only once—in the middle of the night, with a stolen letter in his hands.

The Regent's steady, penetrating stare is scalding. Nicaise opens his mouth, and thinks, this is how Ancel must feel, when he plays with fire. "This is boring," he says, sighing dramatically. "Politics is so boring. You know I don't care about any of this. I'm _bored."_ Nicaise licks his lips as he looks up at the Regent, lashes fluttering. "Can't we talk about something more fun?"

The Regent tilts his head as if regarding a performance that amused him, at first, but has grown dull. "You don't care," he says, "about my nephew?"

Nicaise scoffs. "Why would I care about Laurent?"

"Why indeed?" says the Regent.

Nicaise, for the first time, allows himself to truly consider the danger he's put himself in. He could be branded a traitor, like Laurent. He could disappear, like the other boys.

No one seems to know what happened to the other boys.

He had asked Paschal, at one point, _Did you do this for the others?_ Scornful, sneering. His predecessors, his inferiors. The Regent's _other_ boys. The ones who had been too ugly or stupid or weak to stay in his favor; the ones who couldn't hold his attention past a few fucks, or past a few months, if they were lucky.

Paschal hadn't looked up from his work, had only answered, _Yes._

Nicaise had pouted, a bit. Laurent had brought others, too, then—not just him. _How many of them?_

 _All of them,_ Paschal had said, a strange tightness in his quiet, even voice. _Since the very first one._

He'd hated Laurent a little, then. The pristine, privileged Prince, who had shared his own physician with a long line of weeping, bleeding boys, who saw it as—charity, probably. A distasteful duty. The untouched, untouchable Prince, whose royal knees and hips and thighs were never bruised, beneath all that costly blue fabric, who would never need a sleeping draught or a tonic for his throat. Who would never stumble, limping, to Paschal to beg for a salve. 

Nicaise doesn't owe Laurent anything.

"I don't care about him at all. I don't even think about him, ever. He can rot, for all I care."

"Oh?" says the Regent. "I was under the impression that the two of you were quite familiar." Another precarious pause. "I admit, I've sometimes wondered whether you might want a different royal master." 

Nicaise feels his stomach drop.

_I'll offer for you, if you like. You might prefer that. I'd offer._

"Never," he says vehemently, sounding shrill and desperate to his own ears. "I would never want anyone but you, I would never want _him,_ he's hateful. I hate him. Everyone knows I hate him. You're the only one I want." His voice cracks on that final word, and Nicaise stops. Horrified.

It’s happening, it’s _been_ happening, but it hasn’t happened in front of the Regent until now.

"Perhaps you have grown fond of him," the Regent continues after a taut, terrible pause, as if Nicaise had not spoken. "He is certainly fond of _you._ " A memory flashes across Nicaise's panicked mind: the Regent coming across Laurent and Nicaise playing a game together in the gardens, Laurent laughing at some savage insult; Laurent falling silent immediately upon seeing his uncle and ignoring Nicaise, after, for weeks. "Fonder, perhaps," the Regent is saying thoughtfully, "than he has been of anyone, since—"

"Laurent is a fool," Nicaise interrupts, heart pounding, "not to love you." He gives the Regent a long, lascivious look through lowered lashes. “Laurent doesn’t know you as I do.”

A flicker of amusement. “Is that so?”

Nicaise moves closer—seductive, simpering. “I know you to be the most noble, most gracious, most _merciful_ —”

"Traitors," the Regent says, unmoved, "deserve no mercy." Slowly—deliberately—the Regent looks to Govart's letter on the desk, then back again. "Do they, my sweet boy?"

Nicaise considers his options.

He could lie, of course; he's good at that. No one can prove he took the letter, no one can prove he gave it to Paschal. No one saw him but that stupid slave, and both he and Paschal are with Laurent. But the Regent would know. The Regent _knows._ Lying won't work this time. The stakes are too high for that.

He could say Laurent put him up to it, say Laurent is to blame for everything, say exactly what kinds of _consequences_ Laurent deserves. The Regent would like that, even if he knows it's pretend. He likes hearing other people demean Laurent; likes it best when they repeat his own insults and insinuations back to him. Nicaise could do that, easy. He already does it all the time.

Or—he could fall to his knees and beg for mercy, beg for punishment, beg for the Regent's cock. He could climb into the Regent's lap and beg to be spanked like a child; could beg to be held down and fucked raw until he's bleeding like the first time, like an innocent split open unprepared.

The Regent would like that best of all, he knows. Nicaise is his favorite, his longest-lasting favorite, for a reason.

The Regent is a man with certain needs and demands and desires that no one else in all of Arles understands.

No one except—Laurent.

 _I know your master's tastes,_ Laurent has said. Coldly, flatly: _Oh, I know exactly what my uncle likes._

Laurent, who was cared for by Paschal when he was a boy. 

Laurent, whose ears are pierced like a pet's, but who never wears earrings—never wears any jewels at all.

Laurent, who everyone says is frigid; who everyone says is unnaturally chaste, a laced-up virgin with the vocabulary of a whore; who everyone says was even prettier than Nicaise when _he_ was thirteen.

When he was thirteen, and his whole family died except for his uncle.

“Laurent,” says Nicaise. The room is spinning, re-shaping itself around him. He feels dizzy. He's going to be sick. “Laurent…” Beautiful, brilliant, untouchable Laurent. “Laurent is…” _Family._ Nicaise turns the word over on his tongue, tasting the wrongness of it, the horror. _Your own family._

What does Nicaise know about family?

His own family sold him to the Regent.

“Laurent,” says the Regent, “is—”

“Better than you.” The words spill out before he can stop them, snarling, _vicious,_ and even if he wanted to, Nicaise cannot take them back.

Laurent's uncle simply stares at him for a long moment, something venomous sparking in his eyes: blue locked onto blue. Nicaise can't blink. Can't think. Can't breathe.

“Well,” the Regent says at last, each word sharp as the edge of a blade, “he was certainly better than _you._ ”

Nicaise stays very, very still as the Regent steps closer.

"My nephew," he says softly, and it's when he's softest that he's most dangerous, "was a far more obedient, disciplined boy."

Nicaise swallows hard, his own words to Laurent ringing in his ears. _You're jealous._ Was he?

Or is it Nicaise who has been jealous all along? 

He has always perceived Laurent as competition, somehow—the pet and the prince, each vying for the Regent's attention. An awareness of Laurent lashing out at his uncle, an awareness of the Regent toying with his nephew, an awareness of their twisted, tangled games. An unconscious understanding that they knew each other better, understood each other better, than Nicaise ever could.

_Better than you._

Laurent had never been competing. Laurent had already won and lost.

"Laurent," the Regent is saying, twisting his fingers through the jewels wound into Nicaise's curls and pulling hard, "had no need for your _trifles,_ no need for all your little tricks. He was more lovely than you, more pleasing than you, more clever than you, more talented than you. He was..." Those thick ringed fingers tighten in Nicaise's hair, wringing out a whimper. "Perfect." The Regent bends down, lips curving upward in a slow, sharp smile. "Do you know what happened to that sweet, _sweet_ boy?" Hot breath against his skin: the Regent's mouth at his ear. Nicaise shivers. "He grew up."

 _He gives them all up,_ Laurent has said.

Even a prince, _the_ Prince. Even his most priceless, perfect boy. Even his own family.

Nicaise thinks of the stolen letter, the damning story that it tells. The Regent has killed for power, will kill anyone who stands in his way.

Even his own family.

"You're going to kill him," Nicaise hears himself say as if from very far away—and then, the chilling mirror-thought: _You’re going to kill me._

"I am going to _break_ him," says the Regent, "and _you_... are going to help." 

Nicaise stares at the red laces on the Regent's chest and tries to control his breathing. He's seen Laurent do it, when he's alone with his uncle; it can't be that hard. Deep, steady breaths through his nose.

The Regent tilts his chin up, forcing him to meet that familiar blue gaze. "You have his eyes," he says, "or close enough." The Regent loves his eyes, has always loved them. Loves to see them offset with blue jewels, loves to see them looking up at him through long lashes as—Nicaise draws a shuddering breath. Laurent's uncle is still looking at him, with those same piercing, bright blue eyes. "You both look best in blue."

 _Blue._ The color of the Prince, and the Prince's Guard. Laurent's color. Nicaise's color, now, too. Nicaise closes his eyes, and sees a long line of beautiful boys with eyes the color of sapphires—made in the image of a golden prince whose memory outshines them all. 

"I wonder," says the Regent, trailing a single finger across the collar of bells around Nicaise's throat, "how red will look on you."

Nicaise doesn't think, isn't thinking, can't be, because what he does next—unthinkingly—is unthinkable. 

He kicks the Regent between the legs as hard as he can, and runs. 

He makes it out the doors and down the corridor, makes it all the way outside before the Regent's guards seize him, bearing down upon him in a blur of red cloaks, restraining him as he struggles and screams. The Regent has followed them out and is speaking to the guards, cold and calm and deadly, but Nicaise can't hear him, can't hear anything over the thundering of his own heart. 

When he's forced to his knees in the dirt, the Regent reaches down to wipe away a tear. "We're going to send him a message," he says softly. "My rebellious nephew." The Regent's thumb traces his cheek, a final cruel caress. "My rebellious boy."

 _You're braver than I was, at your age._ Laurent had told him that, once.

Nicaise gathers all of his strength and spite, all of Laurent's cool-eyed contempt and icy arrogance, and spits directly into the Regent's face. 

He barely feels the blows, after that, barely registers the soldier approaching him with a drawn sword. Hooves sound in the distance as the sun glints off the metal, and for one wild moment, Nicaise thinks Laurent has returned to save him, armor shining blinding gold.

"I'll keep the eyes, I think," the Regent says, and someone seizes Nicaise by the hair, wrenching his head back.

A flash of red, a flash of steel—then he's looking up at the sky, and all he can see is blue.


End file.
